Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
>
> On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 10:18:33PM -0500, Jeff Teunissen wrote:
> > Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
> > >
> > > Are licenses where reverse engeneering is prohibiten invalid ?
> >
> > Yes, because reverse-engineering is strictly legal. Yes, even in the
> > USA.
>
> And does it make the whole license void ?
> part of license where they say you cant r/eng ?
> doesnt change anything else in the license ?
> can some lawer confirm it ?
Only the portions of a contract (what a license is considered) that are
not legally permitted are not binding. Even if a portion of a contract is
invalid, the rest of the contract still applies. This is why it is very
difficult to destroy an agreement in a civil matter, but it is a simpler
thing to _weaken_ it.
Also note, reverse-engineering is only reverse-engineering if you don't
violate copyright law to do it. You can't simply copy something wholesale
and call it reverse-engineering. You can study an implementation and use
what you learned from that study to create something that does the same
thing in a different way, but you may not outright steal the
implementation for your own ends and call it your own.
An example case would be the patent on the MP3 compression algorithm. If
there is only one way to create an MP3 stream, then there's no way around
it. If, however, there is another way to create an "MP3" that does not
use the patented algorithm (not even an obfuscated or modified version of
it), then you have found a legal way around it through
reverse-engineering.
--
| Jeff Teunissen -=- Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing -- d2deek at pmail.net
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